Christmas Eve Wine
by Colubrina
Summary: Relationships shatter at Christmas, but they also begin. ONE-SHOT.


Relationships shatter on Christmas.

It's not something anyone likes to talk about. It doesn't go well with holly and wassail and enthusiastic, off-key singing, but it's true. People don't realize how much they love their own traditions, how at their core they think the way their family decorates a tree is the right way. The food their family eats is the most festive. The gifts their family gives the perfect balance between generosity and over-indulgence. They don't realize that until the way someone else does it rubs them the wrong way.

Hermione Granger had been rubbed the wrong way the whole of Christmas Eve. It wasn't that the Weasleys were unwelcoming, or unkind. They wanted nothing more than to take her in and shower her with all their love. Their loud, pushy, jocular love that verged on meanness. Not taking a joke well in the Burrow made you the target of a dozen more, and she'd never liked being mocked. And there were so many of them. So many jokes, so many people, and it was so warm inside. Warm and close and stuffy. She and Ron had been sniping at one another on and off the whole day as tempers frayed under the constant strain of a missing brother, of Fleur's colicky baby, of just enough alcohol to make you say things you'd regret later.

She stood up, halfway through a conversation about jobs and money and ambition. She had too much. Ron had too little. She couldn't take it anymore. She needed air, and to breathe, and to have five minutes peace.

Ron's jaw thrust out as she walked away. She could hear the wine and the resentment in his voice when he said, "If you go, don't bother coming back."

"Ron," his mother said with placating business, "I'm sure Hermione just needs –."

But Hermione picked her bag up off the table as she walked past, opened the door, and was out into the cold air before she heard what it was Molly Weasley thought she needed. Time, maybe, or a baby. What she needed was someone who didn't think Ministry ambitions were funny, and a waste of time, and something she should keep in check. Someone who had at least a little awareness of his own emotions.

Someone who knew how to pick out a decent bottle of wine.

The last was so shallow Hermione let out a little laugh as she drew her wand and apparated away.

Destination, Determination, Deliberation.

Deliberation she had, and determination, but all she focused on as a destination was _someone I'll still like in five years._

It was idiotic. As soon as she blinked out of existence, squeezed into whatever space existed between here and there, she knew she'd made a horrible mistake. She'd be lucky not to end up in pieces all over the highway. A person wasn't a place, and you couldn't apparate to a vague longing.

When she appeared – all in one piece – outside a tea shop she breathed a sigh of relief. The light was on, the store was open, and she pushed open the door. She was luckier than she deserved. She'd find out where she was, maybe get a cup of tea, and then go home. Ron would come by in the morning, filled with apologies and excuses and just enough recrimination to make she sure knew it wasn't really his fault. She'd pushed him until he lashed out.

Just thinking about it made her tired.

The inside of the shop smelled like sugar and peace. Instead of tinny Christmas music, there was the crackling of a fire, and Hermione sank into a chair, grateful for someplace so calm. Maybe her apparition magic hadn't been wholly misguided. She stretched her hands out to the flames before she noticed the only other customer in the shop.

Very blond. Very pale. Very pointy. Draco Malfoy. Great. The shop suddenly seemed small and confining. The waitress brought her tea without asking what she wanted then disappeared, and she was trapped, unable to leave without paying, forced by basic manners to smile at someone she'd have been happy never to see again.

"Granger," he said at her strained attempt at a smile. He quirked his eyebrows up and she waited for the mockery. She'd be willing to bet he plucked those brows, they were so tidy. "What brings you here."

She couldn't answer that. It would be beyond stupid to tell Malfoy she'd walked out on her boyfriend and his family on Christmas Eve. School might be over, and the war long done, but she could still hear him laughing at her buck teeth, at her bushy hair, at her background.

"I'm just out," she said.

"Alone?"

"Is that a crime?" She was falling back into defensive patterns she thought she'd outgrown. Schoolyard bullies were better than parents for turning her back into a child again, she thought bitterly, but the thought of parents – of her parents - made her eyes begin to burn, and she turned her face away from him, but then she was crying, crying in public in some godforsaken tea shop with Draco Malfoy and it was hard to fathom anything could be more humiliating.

He handed her a handkerchief.

"I'm fine," she muttered, but the handkerchief didn't retreat, and she snatched it up and mopped at her eyes.

"Happens to the best of us upon occasion," he said. "Wood smoke and all."

She glanced at him. His face was a study in polite neutrality though there was no way he believed her eyes were watering from the fire. "Quite," she said. "Thank you."

He raised a hand and somehow summoned the waitress back. "I think my friend is a bit peaked," he said. "Could you get us a bottle of a nice red to take the edge off, settle her nerves?"

"You don't have to," Hermione began, but the dratted waitress had slipped away again and Draco plucked the sodden handkerchief out of her hand.

"Call it reparations for six years of torment," he said.

She snorted. If he thought one bottle of wine would make up for all those years of insults, for his bigotry, for the Mark that had to be hidden under his sleeve, he was deluded. But when he added "A down payment, then," with so much wry acknowledgment of the very things she was thinking threaded through his voice she softened.

"Just one glass," she said.

The wine was excellent, and she had a second glass. And then a third. It wasn't as if she had anywhere to go, and Draco Malfoy had a knack for idle conversation. They talked about life since the war, and her job, and he asked clever and interesting questions that made it clear he was listening to her without making it feel like an interrogation. It was the most pleasant evening she'd spent in far too long.

When Draco poured out the last few drops he looked so disappointed she laughed. "I have another bottle of this in my flat," he said. "If you wanted to keep talking."

She did. She did and they did, and then it was midnight and thus Christmas and she was half-asleep, her head on Draco Malfoy's shoulder with no plans to leave.

Relationships break on Christmas, but they also begin.


End file.
